Former president of the Public Service Union, Jacqueline Willoughby, is a long-time trade unionist. But tonight she has severed ties with the Union amid what she calls lingering personal and ethnic differences with fellow unionists. She has engaged legal services to sue certain members of the Union’s Council of Management regarding repeated slanderous allegations made […]
News Five has confirmed that attorney Andrew Bennett is likely headed to the Magistrate’s Court on Wednesday morning – but not to try a case. He will be on the defendant’s side of the courtroom facing Chief Magistrate Sharon Frazer, as his legal team will listen to the evidence presented by the office of the […]
Minister of Foreign Affairs Wilfred Elrington has signed the documents relating to a request for extradition for attorney Andrew Bennett from the U.S. State Department. But closer to home, a relative of his remains on the run from U.S. authorities. Doctor Errol Elrington, brother to Wilfred and Hubert Elrington, is listed among the top ten […]
And that is what the police had to say – but her husband tells a different story. We spoke with Gustavo Velasquez via phone and he told us that Wendy Castro was born in Belize and her birth certificate is legit and was obtained following all the requirements of the vital statistics unit. According to […]
On Thursday afternoon, the Ahmad family, as well as members of the wider Muslim community in Belize, had an extensive sit-down with Minister of Home Affairs Wilfred Elrington. He was accompanied by Commissioner of Police Allen Whylie, as well as several other ranking officers, including assistant commissioners Chester Williams and Joseph Myvett. The purpose of […]
Forty-nine-year-old Mark Pollard, a resident of Peter Seco Street, was reported missing in early July 2017. He has not been seen or heard from since he set out on a routine jog along the Phillip Goldson Highway near the Haulover Bridge. But is his mysterious disappearance the result of a family feud over willed property? […]
According to Espat, he has the blessing of Pollard’s family to proceed with an independent investigation into the disappearance of their loved one. Whatever he is able to unearth from his probe is shared with the police department for officers to follow up on all leads. Jose Luis Espat, Concerned Citizen “I am not […]
Following last week’s encounter between a team of Belizean youth basketballers and members of the Guatemalan Armed Forces, in which the latter tried but failed to stop them circling Sarstoon Island, it appears the Guatemalan army is up to its old tricks again. The GAF have made a habit of following any Belizean craft or […]
The Government of Belize is still in no apparent hurry to amend the 1992 Maritime Areas Act as called for by the Opposition, which introduced it when they were in government. To facilitate a potential settlement of the Guatemalan claim, the Act proposed to set aside territorial waters from Ranguana Caye to the Sarstoon River […]
Five-time Mister Belize Rigoberto “Rigo” Vellos is finding out that politics is not like bodybuilding – it’s a dirty game. The People’s United Party candidate for mayor of Corozal Town is fighting back against allegations of misappropriation dating back to September of 2008. He was dismissed from his cashier’s job at the Social Security Board […]
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Stephen Buckley, the George Street resident who turned his misfortune into a six-figure windfall from the Government of Belize. He was shot in the face while on the way home from work in April of 2010 and received a partial compensation payment of one hundred thousand dollars […]
It has been two weeks since well-known barber Fareed Ahmad was shot and killed near his home in Hattieville. Despite the arrest and subsequent arraignment of a woman police constable on a single charge of murder, there are many unanswered questions that have left the Ahmad family discontent with the Belize Police Department. The committal […]
Lead investigator ACP Chester Williams, who is probing the case from within the Professional Standards Branch, says that he is content that there was no collusion on the part of other members of the Special Assignment Team in Ahmad’s murder. He corroborated that statement by informing the family that there is video footage showing Michelle […]
Another sore spot for the Ahmad family, aside from the murder of their loved one, is the rounding up of its members back in 2016 by the Special Branch of the police department. During that operation as many as twenty persons, including pregnant wives, young children and grandparents, were taken into police custody and held […]
It is a position that Elrington, himself a former defense counsel, agrees with. The family should have been given the opportunity to contact its lawyers and should have been provided with a reasonable explanation for being raided. He promised them that he would personally look into the incident and prepare a report chronicling his findings […]
The ball is in motion for a provisional warrant to be sought for attorney Andrew Bennett’s arrest. That is because Minister of Foreign Affairs Wilfred Elrington has signed documents that will allow the office of the Attorney General to proceed with a request for Bennett’s detention. It is expected that he will be arrested and […]
The allegation of a sexual assault on a sixteen-year-old-boy made headlines this week. The alleged perpetrator is well-known taxi-man Roy “Bullet” Craig, who police say was found nude along with the minor in a hotel room. Bullet has denied the claims by the young boy and was taken before the court on a charge of […]
There have been three murders in the first eleven days of the year. Today, police said they are still questioning persons in the killings of Leon Garcia and Frederick Smith in Belize City. Garcia and Smith were fatally shot while out socializing on separate occasions. Smith was the last murder for 2017 and Garcia was […]
The tremors of a strong seven point six earthquake in Great Swan Island in Honduras were felt as far as Mexico and various areas of the country. Residents in Belize City, up north in Corozal as well as in other coastal areas felt the tremors shortly after nine o’clock on Tuesday night. The warning that […]
The tsunami threat caused a panic in the prime tourism island of San Pedro where residents took no chances and moved to safer buildings and shelters that were immediately opened to accommodate the rush of persons. Sea waters were reportedly receding, but in the following story News Five’s Duane Moody looks at the recent phenomenon […]
Adding to the frenzy following the offshore tremor was the perceived recession of seawater ahead of a resulting tsunami. As we said, it turns out that a phenomenon known as a spring tide has been occurring for the past several days, prior to the earthquake. Many took to social media to post images, as well […]
The Mesoamerican Reef provides economic, social and cultural benefits to Belize. It is valued around a billion dollars and recent reports show that just four of Belize’s seven marine protected areas provide up to nineteen million U.S. dollars per year in economic benefits from tourism recreation. But the reef is exposed to a number of […]
The fate of twenty-eight-year-old Krismar Espinosa of Orange Walk was today in the hands of a twelve-member jury. Espinosa was tried for the second time for the murder of fellow Central Prison inmate Keon Swasey on Christmas Eve, 2009. Swasey was stabbed in the chest twice with a homemade kitchen knife and the murder was […]
A fifteen-year-old girl accuses a man more than three times her age of sexually abusing her for almost a year. Fifty-two-year-old Jose Ardon was initially charged with two counts of unlawful sexual intercourse with the minor, but today he was read an additional nine counts before Senior Magistrate Aretha Ford. According to the minor, the […]
A Belize City man was remanded on Tuesday for an assault that left one man injured. On December twenty-ninth, 2017, Edgar Richards was talking to a friend on Emma Street when forty-five-year-old Paul Jex Senior, armed with a machete, rode up to him and chopped one of his hands. Jex Senior appeared before Senior Magistrate […]
